The Candle Tree

I didn't plan it that way, but apparently I am providing a tour this week of some of my favorite local trees. It started with this one, an elm tree on campus. Bonus points to those who may have noticed that there is a "light shining through trees" sub-theme going on here. (See also Sunday's Let Me Hold You, My Love, and yesterday's Heartlight, Millbrook Marsh.)

This is a tree along East Park Avenue in State College that I think of as "the candle tree," at least in winter. When the leaves are gone, what you see are these spiky branches sticking straight up, not unlike a candelabrum or a menorah.

When you are approaching this tree from the east (which is to say from the Arboretum, where I parked to attend my meeting on campus) in the afternoon, the light is directly behind the tree and it throws long shadows on the sidewalk.

If you stand in the tree-shadow (or kneel in a snow drift, as the case may be, to get an even lower angle), you can shoot directly into the light and still avoid those nasty sun-spots that are nearly impossible to remove from your photos once you've got them.

Park Avenue is a very busy road at pretty much all times of day (though busiest, generally, during morning and late-afternoon rush hour traffic). It took a few minutes of standing there with my camera, snapping away, to get a shot without a single car in it. Finally, success!

I've selected a song to accompany this image whose lyrics contain the words "I light this candle . . . " I could hear Madonna singing it, but I had to look up which song it was. So here is Spanish Eyes, one of my favorite Madonna songs from the Like a Prayer album. (For the record, True Blue and Like a Prayer are my two favorite Madonna albums; yes, I liked her late 80s incarnations best of all.)